If you ever read anything about ships in Russian, you may have guessed that a lot of maritime words you came across are not Russian. In fact, most of them are Dutch. As I don’t know the real reason for that, I explain this aberration by Peter the Great’s shipbuilding stint in Holland.

Of course not all Russian nautical terms are of Dutch origin. There are plenty of English words and phrases too. Famously, “ring the bell”, via folk etymology, became рынду бей (“beat the rynda”), swapping the meanings of the noun and the verb of the English phrase and giving a novel meaning (that of ship’s bell) to the old Russian word рында.